168 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

marries his light-o'-love, performs many alms-deeds, and hurries out
of Italy, ai riving at the English camp at the Field of the Cloth of
Gold, that is, in 1520, fouiteen years bcfoic the Munster rising-—
Jack ignores chronology right to the end.

Nasbis Nashe in his dedication calls The Unfortunate Traveller " this
attitude phantastical Treatise," and promises " some leasonable conveyance
^"^f,__ of history, and a variety of mirth " We have seen how well he
a comitet- ^u^'s &is programme. It would be going too far to describe this as
blast to the first of the anti-romances ; lather is it an effort to present the
Qtherstory- romance of actuality. Nashe beat his antagonists by shifting the
tellers ground. But theie was hardly one of the varieties of fiction then
before the public which Nashe omitted fiom his miscellany. His
" cosenmg page " is not merely a jest-book hero, but also versed
in the arts of cony-catching. He says • " I have done a thousand
better jests if they had been booked in older as they were begotten,"
and he glories in being counted among the " fool-catchers."
Greene's tales of foreign adventure, and the medley of history and
fiction produced by Sidney, Greene, Lodge, and the other romancers,
are left far in the rear. Nashe painted a more vivid though not a
more accurate picture of Italy than his rivals had painted of darkest
London, and vied in sensational interest with the novella whilst
recounting the successive haps and hazards of a grand tour. He
parodied Sidney's feats of chivalric prowess and his love-lorn elegies,
yet thrilled his readers by unearthing a magic mirror in a real town
of Germany, and evoking the seraphic image of Surrey's Geraldine,
Scott was to draw inspnation from that incident, and Coleridge from
the lady's name ; the poets invented a whole love-romance for her
and Surrey. The one thing Nashe did not do was to imitate the
Spanish rogue-story,1

Nashe, however, was only a pioneer. His story is as forced and
as unlikely as the romances that it parodies. But he was undoubtedly

1 Most critics will have it that N«ishe was tiying to emulate Lazarillo de
formes, and that his is the first English example of picaresque fiction. Professor
F. M. Warren is one of the most positive, and finds a singularly close
resemblance m Jack Walton—as he peisistently calls the book—to Aleman's
Guzman de Alfarache^ published five years later He thinks that Nashe and
Aleman, both having Lazanllo before them, may have been indebted further
to picaresque stories that have disappeared (History of the Novel before the
Seventeenth Century^ pp 339-341) There is not the slightest need to postulate
any such thing.